Sponge cake: Soaking up sweet Passover memories

Sponge cake is a staple at Passover, although recipes vary: chances are the one you’ll like best is the one you grew up eating.Michael Bennett Kress
/ Sterling Publishing Co. Inc.

Editors-in-chief of And Then There Was Cake: Desserts to Enjoy and Impress, a fundraising cookbook published in 2013 by Hebrew Academy of Montreal. From left: Vera Preisler, Muriel Cohen, Vanessa Fallenbaum, Jordana Levy, Chaya Lieberman.Handout photo
/ Tango Photographie

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MONTREAL — So tightly do food and memory mingle that sometimes even a single bite of something seems to carry us back in time.

For me, it takes but a forkful of citrus-scented sponge cake and I am transported — in my mind, at least — to the Passover seder table of my childhood at the home of my great aunt.

For holiday dinners, extensions were placed in the wooden table, changing its form from round to oblong; it was covered with a tablecloth and set with the “good” china. The round of glass that ordinarily protected the table was on the floor in the bedroom, out of harm’s way. Folding chairs were placed around the table to augment the upholstered chairs that were part of the set.

There was all kinds of food, from fragrant chicken soup with matzo balls to ovals of gefilte fish, ground fish boiled and then served cold — all of it homemade. There was what felt, to a kid, anyway, like endless reading from the book telling the Passover story, the Haggadah.

But what has stayed with me about those dinners, when I think back on those years, is my Ciocia’s sponge cake. It was something to behold: tall and airy with beaten eggs and almost ethereal, tangy with lemon zest and lemon juice, pale yellow and impossibly light. You could have a hunk of it on your plate and it would disappear in a few bites, all air and love.

Often, she would complain that the cake hadn’t risen high enough or that it had fallen. I suspect she did it so that we would lavish even more praise on the cake than we did anyway — but in my memory, it turned out perfect every time.

At Passover, which this year begins on Monday at sundown, dessert is rendered more challenging by the fact that no flour, indeed no leavening of any kind, is permitted. There are flourless cakes and tortes, of course, but they tend to be dense and low. The rest of the year, one can make sponge cake with sifted cake flour. But during the eight-day holiday of Passover, the flour is replaced by matzo cake meal, made from ground matzo, and potato starch. Different recipes use different proportions and chances are the one you’ll like best is the one you grew up eating.

Before illness claimed her memory, Ciocia shared her Passover sponge cake recipe with me. Hers called for a half-cup of matzo cake meal and a quarter-cup of potato starch for nine large eggs, the zest of a whole lemon and a quarter cup of lemon juice. What makes a Passover sponge cake tall and airy is eggs. She made hers, as most people do, by separating the eggs, beating the whites to a firm peak, then beating the yolks, folding in the remaining ingredients gently and pouring the batter into a lightly oiled tube pan and baking for 45 minutes. That was before I knew a thing about cooking or baking — I attempted the cake only after she was gone — so, although I scribbled madly as she dictated the ingredients and procedure, I missed a few steps: Most recipes, although not all, call for some of the sugar to be added to the yolks and the rest to the whites; I didn’t manage to get down when she added hers.

Sponge cake, whether made at home, from scratch or a mix, or bought at a bakery, is the most widespread of Passover desserts, writes Gil Marks in his authoritative Encyclopedia of Jewish Food (John Wiley & Sons, 2010).

Although I like it best plain, sponge cake is adaptable. Writing in another of his books, The World of Jewish Desserts (Simon & Schuster, 2000), Marks, who is a rabbi, historian and expert on Jewish cooking, described variations including banana cake, carrot cake, date-nut cake and pineapple cake. Variations cited by Goldman in her book include adding grated chocolate, frozen cranberries or shredded coconut.

Sponge cake originated in Spain around the year 1000, Marks writes in the Encyclopedia of Jewish Food. Bakers in Moorish Spain discovered that beating eggs with sugar granules trapped air bubbles so the batter could be leavened without yeast, he explained. Once a little flour was added and the mixture was baked, the result was a light and airy cake that Sephardic Jews enjoyed early on, he recounts.

A branch and twigs tied together served as the first agitating utensil. “However, the batter required more than an hour of beating by hand, so sponge cakes were only enjoyed by the rich or reserved for special occasions,” he writes.

During the Renaissance, sponge cake reached mainland Italy, possibly from Sicily, where Arabs had introduced the technique, Marks writes, or possibly by Sephardic exiles who’d arrived in Italy. Italians ate sponge cake with a custard in a dish they called zuppa Inglese, a forerunner of the English trifle, Marks says. By the start of the 17th century, the egg-foam technique had crossed the English Channel and spread to the American colonies.

The rotary egg beater, developed around 1870, cut down on the tedium and the time it took to make the dessert — and the sponge cake became more popular. Jews who observe the laws of kashrut, who “keep kosher,” won’t eat dairy and meat ingredients at the same meal; because sponge cake contains no butter, Marks observed, it was an ideal choice for kosher meals. When sugar beet factories opened in parts of Eastern Europe in the 19th century and sugar became more readily available, sponge cake became popular among Ashkenazi Jews, Marks writes, and recipes appeared in the first English and American Jewish cookbooks.

As bakers discovered that matzo meal and potato starch could be substituted for the flour in sponge cake, it became popular at Passover, although “the quality of the cake depended on the skill of the cook, and sponge cakes all too often came out dry or rubbery or even collapsed.”

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